This coming week, Titan Books is set to release Showrunners: The Art of Running A TV Show, Tara Bennett’s companion book to the upcoming documentary Showrunners, the ultimate insider’s guide to creating and running a hit show which includes legends such as Joss Whedon, Damon Lindelof, Ronald D.Moore, Jane Espenson, Terence Winter, Kurt Sutter, Janet Tamaro and Bill Prady. Here’s an exclusive excerpt from the book, which hits shelves on September 5th…
With the industry in such flux, writers are also trying to navigate the best paths for their creative careers. Is broadcast in too much disarray to invest? Is cable the right fit for future development? Maybe TV needs to get its act together, and film is the place to hang out for a while? All showrunners are mulling these options, and more, as they think about what their personal futures hold.
ROBERT KING, Showrunner: The Good Wife
Would we consider going to cable for the next show? Yes! Because, even though we like the self-contained aspect of network, what we love about network is that you’re shooting one as you’re writing the next, or the next one after that, so there’s a real organic quality to the way these shows grow. In cable, you usually write them all, film them all, write them all, film them all. What seems advantageous about cable is raising a family, actually engaging with your family more than the three or four weeks a year that you’re on hiatus. There is something that seems very livable, and also, it seems much more approximate to a novel, the serialized novel, which we love.
ANDREW MARLOWE, Showrunner: Castle
A lot of people ask me, “Do you want to continue in television or would you rather go back to features?” I say, “Can’t I do both?” There’s something really fun about features where you walk onto a set and you see the 150 million dollars that you’ve been spending for that two hours. There’s something about creating that experience in the temple that is the movie theater where you can really deal with heightened emotions and go into huge worlds in a really interesting way.
But there’s also something to be said about the day-to-day storytelling and being able to develop your characters over three, four, five, six, seven years. They’re both really great mediums, so even though their base DNA in terms of the storytelling are the same, they require different skill sets, different muscles, and accomplish different things, and I’m interested in both.
DAVID SHORE, Showrunner: House
I probably will go back into TV. It’s been good to me, as TV has been to writers generally. We get to be in charge. We get to tell our stories and we get to tell multiple stories. I think I did something well [with House], but I got lucky. A lot of things came together here. House is very personal. I don’t expect to match this. The success has floored me. I can’t imagine it. It’s not why I do it. I just want to get as big an audience as I can to stay on the air, but this has been unbelievable.
HART HANSON, Showrunner: Bones, The Finder, Backstrom
You know, here’s what’s going to happen. I’m old. One day, no one will call me. No one will want me to be a showrunner. They just statistically won’t want that, so that’s when I’ll stop being a showrunner, and then the question will be, will I go write a book or will I go do cable? Will I go work for one of the people who have come up past me? I don’t know the answer to any of those things because right now I really cannot see past Christmas.
BILL PRADY, Showrunner: The Big Bang Theory
Personally, for me, after The Big Bang Theory (which is I think my fifth or sixth television series) I don’t know if series television is where I would want to tell stories. Series television is an odd intersection of creative work and factory work in that you have to keep making them. It may be a younger man’s game. I don’t know if there are any monarchies opening up, but I’ve always thought ruling a nation would be an interesting line of work. I don’t know how you transition from what I’m doing now to that, but I’m interested.
STEVEN S. DeKNIGHT, Showrunner: Spartacus
Ten years from now I would love to follow the path of a J.J. Abrams, who I think sets a great career goal for anybody who is a showrunner, which is to get to a level where you can have multiple shows on television, where you can co-create shows with the writers you’ve worked with, and love, and you can also have a feature career. I think that is the ideal thing to shoot for and he’s someone that I definitely look up to, not only a creative level, but as a business model. I think that is the thing that every showrunner should shoot for: to have that kind of breadth and depth to your creations.
At one point early on in my career—I think everybody faces it at some point—I was worried that I had run out of ideas. I had nothing left. I had no new projects planned, and I thought: well, what if that’s it, what if the well is dry? Eleven years later, I’m faced with the opposite problem, which is that I have so many projects up on my project board that I look at them and realize there is no way I can do all these before the Grim Reaper takes me. I’m going to go tits up before I get all this stuff out there and I started thinking, “Well, there’s nothing to say that I have to do all of this.” But for me I think the best thing at this point in my career is to try to use the success to do another show, maybe a couple of shows, but get to the point where I can co-create shows with people, help them get it off the ground, come in every now and then and give some encouraging words and lob a few grenades and then ska-doodle.
